Tag Archives: life

Why I hate hay fever, reason #5834

life,

Because even the most ordinary tasks are annoying when your head feels as if it is about to explode. And you’re having sneezing fits that make it worse. And waking up in the middle of the night because you can’t breathe through your nose, your head hurts, and you’re unable to tell whether you’re coming down with a cold, someone has released a noxious chemical into the air, or you’re just having an extra special bad hay fever attack.

I love flowers. I plant too many. So some of this is self-inflicted.

But I refuse to give up my right to grumble!

Even though one of the first things I did when I woke up this morning was to go outside and water my tomatoes. Then I paused to smell the flowers our friend gave us yesterday for our anniversary. Which made me stop to check the roses I gave Michael for the same reason.

I want my pretty flowers, and I think it is really cosmically unfair that I have to put up with all these other symptoms to get them.

*whine* *whine* *grumble*

Is that your car?

life, ,

My sleepy little residential neighborhood is occasionally the site of dramas.

Our building has four units. The building next door is a mirror image of ours, also with four units. Eighteen years ago, when I moved in, the buildings were owned by one family. About fourteen years ago the buildings were sold, separately. There are a couple of shared facilities: a driveway, a tiny parking lot that has fewer spaces than there are units. Each building has its own laundry room and small yards, which are shared, but only between the people in each respective building.

So we have eight households who live close together and have reasons to try to get along besides just happening to be living on the same street. And then, of course, there are other houses and small apartment buildings up and down the block.

There’s one neighbor in the next-door building who is drunk all the time. He’s been in that state for years, and he just doesn’t have many brain cells left. Since his significant other passed away (turns out they weren’t married, which is something we only learned after she died, and her family did everything in their power to keep him away from the funeral, et al), he’s been through a series of increasingly dysfunctional roommates. The latest one seems to be drunk even more often than he is.

When I see them, you’re never sure when one of them is going to be grumpy and snarling, or happy and gregarious. So I limit my interactions mostly to smiling and nodding.

Fairly late last night there was a knock on our door.

A couple of young guys moved into a downstairs unit in our building last week. Until last night, I had only met one of them. They had just witnessed a hit and run involving a car parked on the street in front of our buildings, and weren’t sure whose car was whose.

The weather was warm and muggy yesterday, so they had been standing outside with another neighbor, chatting in the cool air, when a van pulled into the driveway between our building and the building next door. The aforementioned new roommate of the drunk in the other building stumbled out, apparently even more extremely drunk than usual. The van backed up out of the driveway, slammed into a parked car, and then zoomed away.

By the time I had shoes on and was outside, the extremely drunk neighbor was insisting she didn’t know who had dropped her off, another neighbor was on the phone with police trying to describe the runaway car, while the neighbor who owned the damaged car was trying to figure out how bad said damage was.

After ascertaining that no one had been hurt, I wasn’t sure what help I could be. If police came to take a statement, since I had neither seen nor heard the crash, I figured me standing around outside would just add to the confusion.

And it was a little awkward listening to one of the owners of the damaged car trying to get the extremely drunk person to admit to remembering anything useful.

I should be out there dealing with some weeds and doing some pruning of the one rose bush that is going a bit bananas. Or at least take the trash out.

But I keep finding excuses to stay inside, because I anticipate awkward conversations or something.

Which is silly. Because the awkwardness isn’t even mine. I’m not even a witness. I’m barely a bystander.

But you feel bad for people who are in awkward situations. And you wish, somehow, that you could fix things.

It feels wrong to just say, “It’s nothing to do with me.” Because while the current situation doesn’t directly involve me, the ongoing difficulties of having the two clueless drunks living next to everyone—and the string of odd, annoying, and occasionally more serious issues that keep happening around them—are shared by all of us.

Even more surely than the shared driveway.

There’s some profound point in all of this, I’m sure. Something about unchosen communities and why we can’t go through life saying, “nothing to do with me.” And something about that weird spectrum with meddling in other people’s lives on one end and not caring what happens to them at the other, and how do we find an acceptable position in the middle.

If I think of it, I’ll let you know.

Starting your day right

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A few weeks ago I found myself trying to explain to a good friend precisely why it is I forget to eat breakfast on weekends, and more specifically, why “You just need to get into the habit” isn’t helpful to hear. While I agree that it’s never too late to learn knew things, it’s important to recognize that when one has failed for decades to undo a bad habit, it is going to take more than a pep talk to change it.

Which isn’t to say that I’m not still trying. It’s not the only habit I fight with. When I was in my 30s, for instance, was when I first realized that I was no longer capable of staying up to all hours a few nights every week and still put in a full, productive work week. I had to get out of the habit of staying up really late and sleeping in on weekends. And as I started doing a better job of getting up on weekends only a little later than weekdays, I found Mondays no longer felt like such a drudge and disaster.

It’s not easy. I’m not a morning person, and that isn’t just a preference. If given a chance, my natural body clock switches to almost a nocturnal schedule. Some of us are wired that way. So pursuing a career involving a more or less traditional office job is a constant fight.

After my late hubby went through his first round of chemotherapy, he had a very hard time sleeping more than a couple of hours at a time. One of the things we tried was melatonin, which is a natural hormone involved in regulating the sleep cycle. Melatonin tablets are very useful for people who work rotating shifts, or otherwise can’t sleep at the same time each day. It didn’t really help Ray.

Since I’d done a lot of research on it before Ray tried it, it occurred to me that I could use it when my sleep schedule got out of whack. Since it’s the same hormone that causes drowsiness naturally, taking the tablets don’t “dope you up” like other kinds of sleeping pills. Though research indicates we can’t build up much of a tolerance for it (it’s a hormone, after all), there is some concern that over-using might cause your body to produce less of it naturally. The upshot is that it’s advised only to use it the first night or two when you need to change your schedule.

So I tried it one Sunday evening, taking it about an hour before I needed to be asleep to get ready for work, and I laid down with a book. I conked out about a half hour later, and as the cliché says, slept like a baby.

I woke up the next morning about a half hour before my alarm went off, feeling better that I ever remembered having felt on a Monday morning. And the weird thing was, without taking any more pills, I reliably started getting drowsy for the next three or four days right about the time I’d taken the pill on Sunday. My personal natural cycle of not feeling drowsy until well after midnight did start to assert itself after a number of days, but for most of the week, it was great.

So, I decided that I should make it a regular thing to take one tablet every Sunday. And it works great.

When I remember to do it.

The problem is, if I don’t pay close attention to the time on a Sunday evening, it’s easy to miss the time. If you take it later, that defeats the purpose, because you’re setting the sleep cycle wrong.

I first tried it 18 years ago. I go through phases where I get good at remembering to do it, week after week, and it’s easy to get up and get into work on time without doing a lot of rushing, or feeling discombobulated at the beginning of the week.

But then I’ll miss a Sunday. And then I miss another, and pretty soon months have gone by without me remembering.

No amount of setting computer reminders or giving myself pep talks will work. Because no matter how determined I may be when I set the reminder to go do it as soon as the reminder happens, if by chance I’m in the middle of writing something that I’ve been trying to finish for a long time, or working on some other thing, I’ll think, “Yes, I’ll do that in just a minute…” and the next thing I know, it’s 45 minutes later.

But man, when I do remember, those Mondays are awesome!

You’ll feel different when…

life, love, people, ,

When I was in my late teens, I once got into a peculiar argument with a slightly older friend. I had made a comment to the effect that I could never see myself being happy living in a city. It had taken me a few years to get used to living in a town that was big enough to require more than one high school, after spending most of my life living in very small towns.

He was attending college in a nearby city at the time. He said he had felt the same way just a few years before. “You haven’t actually lived in a city,” he pointed out. “You’ll feel differently after you do.”

At least, that’s what I heard. It is quite possible that he actually said, “You may feel differently,” but I heard the firm assertion that he knew exactly how I would feel, and it activated my obstinate streak. I pointed out that I had been visiting a couple of cities fairly regularly, and I had a pretty good idea what they were like. Except I probably said it a bit meaner. I know I made a lot of disparaging observations about cities during the course of it.

A year or so later, I was attending college in a city. By the time I finished college, I had some good job prospects, and I had become quite enamored with several aspects of city life. So I stayed. And the longer I stayed, the more I liked living here. When I visit my mom in the town where I went to high school, I find I feel a lot differently about several aspects of living there which I used to think of as advantages.

My friend was right, and I was wrong.

Another time another friend and I had gotten into a discussion about my dismal love life. Most of the time there had been no love life at all. The few exceptions had failed spectacularly, though each in a different way. I trusted this friend more than I had ever trusted anyone, so I told him that I suspected I was bisexual, and I thought that perhaps that might be playing into my difficulties.

He immediately asserted that 1) I could not possibly be bi, and 2) once I stop doubting myself I would find the perfect girl for me. He argued his point with such emphatic certainty, that I doubted my own feelings and experiences.

Of course, I wasn’t being entirely honest. I didn’t merely suspect that I was not heterosexual. I had quite incontrovertible evidence. My friend was also operating under the same societal brainwashing that was responsible for the megaton of internalized homophobia I was carrying around at the time.

Eventually, I worked through that baggage (though it got more than a bit messy) and came to understand that my friend was wrong. I had only been half-right in understanding myself and my future, but the half I was wrong about was part and parcel of the parts he was wrong about.

Of course, one could argue that my friend was partially correct. Because eventually I did find the right person for me—a guy who made me so happy, who I couldn’t imagine living without, and who made me brave enough to stop living the lie of being closeted.

Our fairytale ending didn’t last as long as I hoped—Ray died a bit over six years after we moved in together. I had to figure out how to have a life that no longer had him in it. I have since been lucky enough to fall in love with another wonderful man, who has stuck with me for 15 years, so far, and even said “I do” when we finally could do so, legally, a few months ago.

The two friends who were adamantly convinced that I would feel differently one day were correct that my perspective changed, but their certainty about the way my perspective would change was at best guess work. It was also a bit of projection. Like people who insist that another person saying they don’t want to have kids “will feel different when you have your own,” they’re unable to conceive of anyone being happy and fulfilled living differently than themselves.

Just like I was when arguing with my first friend that I’d never be happy in the city.

Because we all do it. At one time or another everyone has either offered advice along that line. Or we’ve complained to a mutual friend, wondering why the person doesn’t see the obvious solution and do things this way. We may be right that there’s a better way, but it isn’t our life. No matter how smart or sympathetic we think we are, we don’t know what it’s like to be them.

Memorial

historical trivia, , ,

Grandma often called it by the older name, “Decoration Day.” Each spring, as May approached, Grandma would start making phone calls to distant friends and relatives, making sure that flowers would be placed on the graves of relatives in that area. She would also make plans for the graves of relatives that were within a reasonable drive of her home. During the days in the week before Memorial Day she would visit each of those graves and place flowers. If the particular relative in question had also been a war veteran, she would place a small U.S. flag along with the flowers.

The pastors in the Southern Baptist churches we attended might give a sermon on the last Sunday in May about the importance of turning grief into rejoicing because someone has been “taken home to be with the Lord.” There would be some mention of people who died in military service (often as part of one of the prayers, asking god to comfort the families of the fallen soldiers, airman, marines, and sailors), but it was seldom the primary focus of the sermon.

For most of my childhood, I understood that Memorial Day was a time for families to visit the graves of loved ones. It was about remembering anyone who had died. The fact that many people used the day to specifically remember and honor those who had died in battle seemed to be a subset of the larger goal of celebrating the lives of all your loved ones who had died.

Most of my grade school career occurred before the passage of the federal Uniform Monday Holiday Act, so Memorial Day landed on whatever day of the week May 30 was, and I don’t think we were usually let out of school to observe it. When the Monday Holiday Act went into effect, I remember a lot of grumbling from various adults in my life. One particular rant stood out: an older man at the church potluck in May started complaining about “Yankees taking a good, pro-family holiday and turning it into a pro-federalist celebration of war!” He was shushed by his wife before he got too far along.

I didn’t meet my first Radical Memorialist until High School. Someone made a comment about the big barbecue their parents were planning for the weekend, and another of my classmates went ballistic. Memorial Day was not supposed to be about parties and celebrations! It was a serious day to remember people “who gave the ultimate sacrifice to keep this country free!” Anyone who didn’t do that was ignorant and shallow at best, selfish and unpatriotic at worst.

I genuinely was stunned. This being in the Stone Age (before the advent of the internet), I had to look up Memorial Day in an Encyclopedia. And that’s when I first learned how the original Memorial Day had been observed in 1866 intended to honor “those fallen in battle defending their nation during the recent rebellion.” A decidedly northern perspective.

Before that time, many southern states had a tradition of a Decoration Sunday that sometimes happened in April, in other places in May, where the aim had been to put flowers on the graves of family members. Families would frequently have a picnic lunch in the graveyard or cemetery, telling stories and celebrating the lives of their dearly departed. These often turned into family reunions, because family members living far away would try to get home for Decoration Sunday.

Which is why for many years a few southern states didn’t recognize a state holiday of Memorial Day. Several of those that did recognize Memorial Day still also had a separate Confederate Memorial Day or Confederate Decoration Day, because even today in those places Memorial Day is seen by many as “pro-Union.”

Of course, the historical reality is more complicated than that original encyclopedia article I read. While the Civil War was still raging, groups of people, mostly women, in both the north and the south organized days to decorate graves of soldiers from both sides. There was a recognition of the common humanity of all the soldiers. Some people coordinated it with the existing Decoration Days, others did not.

When I saw certain people going off on rants this weekend, angry that there are people who don’t spend the entire three day weekend on the sober, solemn, and somber business of mourning fallen veterans, I felt conflicting emotions. Of course we should be grateful to the memories of the men and women who have died in battle, fighting in our name in various wars and conflicts around the world. Of course we should comfort grieving widows and widowers. We, as a nation, should take care of children bereft of a parent because of a war fought in our name. Of course we should do all of those things.

But being a jerk to people who don’t choose to do it precisely the same way and at precisely the same time as you? That isn’t something I can support.

Memorial Day in my family was always a day to honor the memories of people such as my great-grandparents: people I knew and loved and who are no longer with us. It was a time to call my maternal grandmother to hear about everyone she had contacted while arranging the flowers, to get news from distant relatives (many of whom I barely remembered). For the last several years I haven’t been able to do that part. Grandma died on the Friday before Memorial Day, 2007. She was putting flowers on the grave of one of my great-aunts. My step-grandfather was getting ready to take a picture, when Grandma looked up, said she didn’t feel good, and then she fell over, suffering a massive aneurism.

We realized the next Memorial Day that none of us knew how to contact everyone that Grandma always got hold of to make sure flowers were placed on the graves of my great-grandparents, or Great-great-Aunt Pearl, or several others of the more distant relatives. My aunt located a few. One of my cousins tracked down a few others. and all of us spend some time on this weekend thinking about Grandma, and all the ways she kept everyone connected.

I’ve spent other time this weekend thus far thinking of many people I have had the privilege of knowing and loving who are no longer with us. My two grandfathers and eight great-uncles who served in WWII among them. Rather than lament their loss, I think about the good things they did, and about the fun times we had together. Memorializing someone should be about celebrating their life. Not just weeping.

And it certainly shouldn’t be about scolding people who have the temerity to wish you a happy holiday weekend.

Why Seattleites don’t use umbrellas

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I’ve been asked the question many times: as rainy as Seattle is, why don’t any of you have umbrellas? The answer is surprisingly logical, but it takes awhile to explain.

First, despite the reputation, Seattle isn’t as rainy as you think. Manhattan gets more precipitation per year than Seattle, for example. Now, it’s true that within an hour’s drive of Seattle are rain forests that get far more rain than that, but because of mountain ranges to the east and west, plus the the enormous heat sink that is the Puget Sound (an arm of the Pacific Ocean) on one side, and the slightly less enormous heat sink of Lake Washington on the other side, we have weird weather patterns that pushes a lot of the moisture into a convergence zone north of us.

One reason the people who visit or move here from other places think it rains more than it does is because we have many, many, many days of overcast with cool temps and a damp feeling in the air—but not rain. It feels like rain, or at least as if it must have just been raining minutes ago and you just missed it. So they think of some days as rainy when there wasn’t any actual rain.

When we do have rain, all that geography I mentioned means it might be drizzling in one neighborhood, but dry as a bone only a few blocks away.

The rain itself often comes as such a light drizzle that it feels more like a heavy fog or mist than rain. On days like that, it doesn’t matter whether you have an umbrella. If you’re walking, you get damper and damper and damper just from colliding with those micro droplets that seem to hang suspended, rather than fall.

We have a variant of that, where the rain is coming down as perceptible drops, but each seems to be accompanied by a host of the micro droplets. So it feels like you’re immersed. One of my friends describes it as, “It’s like there’s no difference between the air and the river or lake or whichever body of water is nearest.”

On those very rare occasions where the rain is very heavy, it’s almost always horizontal, because it is almost always accompanied by a strong wind. Again, a regular umbrella is useless against that (and is likely to be more of a bother, as the wind keeps trying to yank it away).

While we’re on the subject of wind, we have lots of places where the wind is constant. My office is a few hundred feet from the water front, and the first two miles of my walk home from work is similarly very close to the water. There is a constant airflow either toward the water or away from it in that zone. Because it is constant, it often doesn’t feel like a breeze. It seems to be almost nothing. You notice it most on either very warm days or cold ones. Because if the breeze is coming off the water, it’s always cold. So when the weather is uncomfortably warm, the side of you body facing the water feels noticeably cooler than the other side. If the overall weather is cold, that same breeze makes one side of your body feel as if it has already frozen, and the other side is significantly less frigid.

I’ve watched people try to walk with umbrellas in that part of town a lot. I assume most of them are tourists, as there are a lot of tourist places in the neighborhood. Even though it doesn’t feel like much of a breeze, people are fighting with the umbrellas at every corner. That airflow is sneaky that way. While you’re walking along beside a building, you feel a slight tug on the umbrella, but it’s easy to hang onto. Suddenly, as you get to the intersection, the pressure starts ramping up. Again, it doesn’t feel like an actual wind in your face, yet the umbrella is suddenly yanking and swooping and surging like a living thing trying to escape you.

In between the extremes I described above, we have rain that is a bit more like what people from other parts of the world think of as rain, and on those rare days an umbrella can be helpful—for the three to five minutes it actually is raining at the spot you happen to be at. So, for three to five minutes, ten or eleven days out of the entire year, an umbrella can be useful.

I’m not a native Seattleite. So when I first moved here, I owned an umbrella—for a while I owned a few of those compact collapsing umbrellas, plus one traditional big umbrella. I tried different strategies, such as keeping one at the office, one at home, and one in the car, so I would always have one handy. Or I carried a compact one around in my backpack. The problem remained that either I didn’t happen to have it near me when it would have been useful, or I’d have problems because of the wind, or by the time I dug it out and deployed it, the rain had either stopped, or shifted to the misty drizzle.

Most of the year one needs to have at least a light jacket handy, because it can go from sunny and pleasant to overcast and cold multiple times a day. Similarly, you need to have some sunglasses nearby, because those sun breaks can be quite blinding. You will use sunglasses hundreds, maybe thousands of times a year. But an umbrella will only be useful, at the very most, a dozen times a year.

And that’s why most Seattleites don’t use umbrellas—but almost all of us have spare pairs of sunglasses stashed around.

Tiny living…

life,

For several years my late husband, Ray, and I lived in studio apartment that was just a bit larger than 200 square feet. It had a real, if teeny, bathroom, and there was a kitchenette in one corner. Things were tightly crammed in, but we managed. For a couple years after that, we lived in a place a bit more than twice as big, which was a less cramped—but still tiny enough that it was an uncomfortable chore to have more than one or two friends visit.

Truth be told, we weren’t really living in such a tiny place. We only got by thanks to a rented storage unit down the road where most of my gigantic collection of books sat in boxes. We also kept seasonal clothes there, swapping out part of our wardrobe a couple times a year.

When we moved to a larger, two-bedroom apartment, it was like moving into a castle. There was so much room! Even after we bought a dozen big bookcases and unpacked all my books. Now, 17 years later, I’m in the same place and I suspect some folks who have visited our place would refer to it as a small apartment.

Shortly after we moved into this place, another couple moved into a small studio in the same complex. It’s a little bit bigger than the studio (in another neighborhood) we had lived in. Whereas we had had a storage place down the road, their spill over was vehicles. When they first moved in they had three vehicles: a classic Volkswagon Beetle, a big panel van with a rack of conduit and stuff on top, and a small pickup (a beat-up red Toyota, as I recall). And they parked all three on the street because their unit didn’t have an off-street parking space.

This was a problem for us as our unit also didn’t have an off-street parking space, and we owned one car. Not one car each, one between us. Which I sometimes feel guilty about as I don’t drive very often. But it’s still fewer cars than people. Not to mention the difficulty friends had finding parking when they come to visit.

A few months later, the couple with three vehicles already acquired a new truck. Not just any truck, this was on of those pickups with four doors, so it’s much longer than the van. They didn’t trade-in any of the vehicles they already had on the new truck. So they were two people, living in the city, with four vehicles.

The one time I engaged in conversation about the vehicles, I tried to ease into it by talking about the classic VW, since I knew a few people who drove hybrids that had been built in old VW chassis. I didn’t say what I had been thinking: why are you guys taking up all the parking space on the street? I just asked whether the VW was all original equipment, or if it was some kine of re-furb.

In answer, I got a bit of a lecture about how environmentally friendly driving a small car like the VW to work every day was, and how keeping the old van running for the contracting business the hubby did was more responsible than buying a new van every few years, and while the VW was perfect for her to get back and forth to work and such, her husband was just too big to fit comfortably in it, so they of course had to have a vehicle they could both fit in for running errands and such. (I learned later than another neighbor had recently bluntly confronted them about the number of vehicles they owned.)

I understood all of that. But first, that had nothing to do with them deciding to buy a gas-guzzling behemoth in addition to the others, especially when they were parking all of their vehicles on public property. I would probably have still been annoyed at the giant truck often being in my way, even if they had gotten rid of the older pickup, but this was a big step beyond.

She also talked about how cheaper it was for them to rent an apartment in the city close to where she worked than where they had lived before, where there had been more parking. I stopped myself from suggesting that the point of living close to work is usually to eliminate the need for a dedicated commuting vehicle (I live much further from my work than she did at the time, and I take the bus and walk, for instance).

The kicker was they had stopped driving the smaller truck. When someone reported it abandoned and it was ticketed, they moved it to a different spot on the street and put a For Sale sign in the window. And then, they bought a motor cycle. Not a little, economical scooter, a ginormous, rattle windows in houses a mile away motorcycle.

By that point, a bunch of neighbors were tired of the whole mess. Multiple people started calling to report the pickup that never moved. Since the newer truck tended to get left in the same spot for many days at a time, a few people called that in, too. After getting several abandoned vehicle tickets, they finally took the small truck somewhere to sell it, and began making plans to move to “a friendlier neighborhood.”

They had it backwards. The rest of us weren’t the unfriendly neighbors.

Yes, parking on the street in our neighborhood is open to the public. And our particular block has a number of small apartment buildings with inadequate off-street parking. If the households living in every individual “living unit” on the street had only one car each, there would have to be some cars parked on the street all the time. This was a decision made by builders, and sanctioned by the city when it granted building permits. There was an assumption that either some people wouldn’t have cars, or that some of us would park on the street.

It is getting easier and easier to get by without a car in the city. And I know, being a car owner myself, I am living somewhat in a glass house if I complain about this couple.

But the point I’m meandering to is that a lot of choices that we make about how we live have consequences on other people’s lives. Yes, they had a legal right to buy what cars they wanted. But parking that many on the public right of way isn’t really fair use. Parking isn’t the only impact that people have an a neighborhood, by any means.

So I have misgivings about some of the practices some owners in several neighborhoods are undertaking, finding loopholes in the current regulations to subdivide existing apartments into smaller and smaller units in the name of “affordable housing.” Yes, if someone wants to live in a place that size, they may do so, but the mere presence of many more people in a given neighborhood is going to infringe on the lives of other people in that same neighborhood.

Asking to have my misgivings addressed isn’t being a bad neighbor. It isn’t being classist. It isn’t being a “not in my backyard.” It’s one citizen saying, “You haven’t answered all my questions, yet.”

Mundanity and a slice of key lime pie

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The pollen count as been up, and up, and up, and down, then up, then, not-quite-so up (but not enough of a drop to count as down), and so on for the last few weeks. So most days I have fairly bad hay fever. Couple that with some big deadlines at work, and my productivity on home projects, including my own writing, has not been great.

It doesn’t help that we’re getting into heavy movie season, with Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness taking up a bit of my time and a lot of my mental space.

Friday before last started like a typical work-from-home day. I got up, took some sinus medication because of the hay fever, logged into the work network, dealt with some emails, then downloaded some files to work, before taking a break to drive my husband to work. I do that on work-from-home days so that I can pick him up at the end of the day and we can go directly out to dinner afterward, rather than waiting for him to ride his bike home and so on.

By mid-afternoon I was feeling really tired and my throat was starting to hurt. Throat symptoms are not typical for my hay fever, so I was beginning to worry. Then my hubby walked in the door, saying he’d left work because he was sick–sinus headache, sore throat, itchy eyes, and a fever. He went straight to bed.

I kept working until the end of my work day, but I was getting a bit groggy. Some point in there I took my temperature and confirmed I was running a low-grade fever. Finally, I logged out, went upstairs, and collapsed into bed. I woke up an hour or so later and asked Michael what he wanted for dinner. Neither of us felt like cooking. What I was craving was burgers and pie. As soon as I mentioned pie, Michael admitted that sounded good. But neither of us knew anywhere that delivered pie. So I drove to the store, picked up juice and things for easy meals for the next couple of days, and a banana cream pie. Then I got drive-through burgers.

I had to take another nap after dinner. Then we slept in both Saturday & Sunday, both of us taking frequent naps. Originally we had been planning to go out to see Iron Man 3 on Friday night, so when on Sunday afternoon we realized we both felt a bit better, were both feeling a little stir crazy, and there was a showing at the theatre within walking distance in about 35 minutes, we went. We stopped at one of our favorite restaurants on the walk back afterwards for dinner, then came home. I took another nap before waking up to serve us each a slice of pie.

So we had pie several nights in a row. It made being sick seem a little less icky.

For various reasons I needed to go into work earlier than usual three days the following week. One of those days I wound up driving in, which I almost never do, because it was the only way to make sure I arrived when I needed to. The drive in took less time walking to the bus, riding the bus, then walking to the office. But the drive home, as it has every time I’ve driven to this office, took more than three times as long as the drive in.

Friday night we saw the new Star Trek movie. I want to see it on the big screen again. Probably several more times. Yes, I liked it that much.

When I was picking up groceries Saturday in preparation for friends coming over for the monthly writer’s meeting, when I went looking for desserts I found myself picking both a coconut cream pie and a key lime pie. Just because pie sounded good, and one friend who usually attends really like coconut cream, while another friend who attends less frequently really like key lime. I like both (even though all this pie isn’t really on my diet). So while I was a bit disappointed that the key lime-liking friend didn’t attend this month, it was kinda nice to have all that leftover pie in the fridge Sunday.

Because it’s always nice to have pie.

Regret is the mind killer

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I read this great post, “The Reading Police of the Young,” and found myself remembering the weirdly inconsistent way my reading habits were monitored when I was a kid.

For example, I remember longing to read my mom’s copy of Dune, the paperback sitting squeezed between a bunch of her Agathe Christies and Robert Heinleins. Mom had told me I wasn’t old enough after she finished it. When she realized I kept looking at the book–not reading it, not even opening it, just looking at the cover–she moved it to the small shelf in the bedroom, the one that had Dad’s books that I wasn’t allowed to read (mostly Matt Helm and James Bond books, whose sexual situations were considered pornographic back in the day, but are rather quaint and downright prudish when compared to modern prime time fare).

And so I wondered what forbidden topics were hidden within. When I finally did read it, some time in my teens, I was a bit disappointed. Not at the book, I found the story quite interesting. I was disappointed because there didn’t seem to be anything in it that should have been forbidden.

I mean, yes, it is clear that the Baron has a thing for pretty young men, but there is nothing about the way it is described that anyone could call erotic. And Herbert’s unconcealed homophobia, manifested primarily with the old cliche that the more gay a character is, the more evil they are, should have resonated quite nicely with Mom’s evangelical sensibilities.

Those evangelical sensibilities waxed and waned throughout my childhood. At one point she was encouraging me to read Asimov (both his fiction and nonfiction), Tolkein, LeGuin, and Bradbury. At another point we had the first book-burning incident–when under the influence of a new pastor, she decided that the astronomy books I’d checked out from the library were astrology books, and since astrology is the same as satanism, the books needed to be destroyed.

(I still occasionally have bad dreams that include a reenactment of my tearful explanation to the librarians about why I couldn’t bring the books back. When they called Mom to ask for the books, she harangued them for letting children check out satanic books. The library set up a special spot for my books from then on. I could check out books and read them in the library, but couldn’t take them home.)

The second book-burning had been Dad. Dad’s reasons weren’t overtly religious, my dad is the kind of atheist who is angry at god for not existing (think about that for a bit). No, he decided that I was getting bullied at school so much because I spent too much time “living in a fantasy world.” His book burning was worse because he forced me to pile up the books, pour the accellerant on, light the match, and watch it burn. With random slaps and punches because I was crying while doing it.

Then a year or so later, he bought me an encyclopedia set and told me that I was going to go to college and “make something of yourself” or else.

For the longest time I attributed those mixed messages to the ebb and flow of Dad’s alcoholism and abusive behavior. The worse Dad got, the more intense Mom’s fundamentalism got. When Dad appeared to be changing for the better, Mom loosened up and re-embraced her inner sci fi and comics fangirl.

Those were definitely major factors in the dysfunction in our family, but I wonder how much of the inconsistency was also due to their youth. My parents were both 16 years old when they married, then I was born 6 days before my dad’s 18th birthday. Current brain research indicates that the prefontal cortext (the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, foreseeing consequences, emotional modulation, et cetera) doesn’t fully develop until around the age of 25.

That couldn’t have helped.

While both of them were readers who believed in the value of education, I know both of them felt they hadn’t done as much with their own lives as they could have or ought to have. So while hope for their kids drove some of their decisions, regret played a very big role, as well. Regret drove them to push me to do better in school, which is a good goal. But regret also drove them to micromanage my behavior on all levels, which isn’t just impractical, but if they had been successful would have had the opposite of the desired effect.

We can’t learn how to do anything correctly without learning from our mistakes as well as our successes. That’s just as true for thinking and imagining as it is for basketball or playing the piano. And while there is value in studying what other people have done, it isn’t sufficient. You have to try, fail, and improve on your own. Avoiding someone else’s mistake is no guarantee you won’t make new mistakes. Trying to duplicate someone else’s success may help you find a good way to do something, but it should also lead you to new directions they couldn’t explore.

And when you are buried in your own frustrations and regrets, you’re least likely to possess the objectivitely required to identity just which if your own past actions were mistakes, and which weren’t.

Regret, in that case, becomes both the mind-killer and dream-destroyer. You can’t wallow in the regret. Face it, yes. Let it serve its purpose of motivating you to do better. But then, let go. And become the better you.

Why I hate hay fever, reason #5821

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Sometime in the wee small hours, an alarm went off. My befuddled, barely awake brain was arguing about whether it was a fire alarm or the Emergency Broadcast System while I was stumbling around the dark house, trying to find what had made the noise.

Both TVs are off, and the alarm had stopped and I couldn’t find anything in the house that was smoking, ominously glowing, or otherwise in a disturbing state.

My head hurt, but I wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t merely because I had been awakened from a sound sleep. I crashed back into bed.

About an hour later I woke up, and my mouth was so dry it hurt. My headache was much, much worse. I lurched and stumbled my way to the kitchen, guzzled a glass of water, then refilled and drank some more water, and tried to make myself think. Everything seemed foggy, and I suddenly remembered the alarm from before. Maybe I couldn’t find what was wrong because whatever it was was happening in one of the other apartments, and smoke was slowly filling all the units?

I went to the front door and opened it. The cold air felt good, but didn’t seem to be any less foggy than the air inside the house. I concluded that everything looking foggy was just a combination of me not being fully awake, and the usual blurriness of not having my glasses.

My mouth still felt terribly parched, even though I’d had two large glasses of water. I went to the kitchen, had another glass of water. By which point the bad feeling of the dry mouth had lessened enough that the sinus headache was more noticeable. So I took some cold tablets, drank some more water, and collapsed back into bed.

By the time I woke up for real, it was clear that I was having really bad hay fever. I took some more meds. When I went to get some more water, I found my phone on the counter. There were two amber alert messages, the first at 3:30 am. The phones make a noise similar to the Emergency Broadcast System alert sound when the emergency alerts come through. That must have been what I heard. And it had sounded like it might be coming from either the kitchen or the living room because, by chance, both Michael and I had left our phones off the chargers. Mine was left in the kitchen, his in the living room.

Michael is also having a horrid hay fever day. We’ve both taken naps. All of my sleeping periods since the stupid alarm have included dreams about fires and explosions and the like. Earlier I told Michael I blame the alarms, but the hay fever contributes. In my bad dreams about fires and explosions, I keep getting eye and head injuries, for instance, which I take as my subconscious trying to figure out why my head and eyes hurt so dang much.

Plus, severe hay fever just messes you up. It isn’t just the drugs that make your brain go woodgie1. The histamine cascade causes changes in blood vessels, releases various enzymes, and other systemic changes. When you throw meds to deal with the pain or sinus pressure on top of that, it should be no surprise that one’s mental processes function differently than usual.

And I hate it!

1. Yes, that’s a technical term.